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The Truth of Creative Exploration with Andrew Rae

We are social beings. We hunger for connection with one another, and finding a common experience. As more and more of that experience happens online, our worlds become smaller and closer together creating a collective community. It is to that online community that we bring the results of our daily lives and we share them with one other, usually for a good laugh.

Syzygy Group, the digital marketing agency, took a look at 2014 and found some of the most effective and invasive moments of the whole year. They whittled them down to their top twenty and asked illustrator Andrew Rae to take a crack at compiling all those moments into a single image. Using only optional clues, anyone is welcome to take a look at Andrew’s illustration and make their best guesses at the list of “20 Things.” Participants can win a signed print of the illustration just by engaging.

20 separate elements are a lot to juggle when it comes to squeezing everything into an image. It can be a tall order. “At first I was kind of like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to put this together, where do you start?’” says Andrew of approaching the project at first. “I actually found myself just naturally starting to work things together.” Initially he was going to work on each element separately, but by starting from a creative place, everything started to come together.

As soon as Andrew gave into that creative impulse, the layout for the drawing presented itself. “I just started drawing really, and as the idea of how to draw each element came to me, it also seems to be quite apparent how to put it all together in an image,” he says. “It all kind of fell into place which is nice because it doesn’t always work like that.”

Part of the joy of this project was that Andrew got to poke fun at all these pop culture events. “It’s quite nice to have a go at U2,” Andrew said with a laugh. “They were very open to me having some fun with it.” It was that creative allowance that meant Andrew was able to find his way into the piece and give it the composition it needed.